paper dollars - Money derived from human creativity and labor alone, with no or minimal use of natural resources. Services generally fall into this category. In some cases wealth seems instantly available in nearly unlimited quantities -- when a book, album, or product becomes a bestseller, or when high-priced consultants, lawyers, and athletes command enormous sums for an hour's work. Yet such money can vanish as quickly as it appears -- witness the dot com crash. Compare mineral dollars, solar dollars.

partial rest - Takes place when grazing or browsing herbivores are on the land, but without predators to excite them and keep them bunched. Calmly walking around, the animals barely disturb the soil surface and trample very little material onto the ground. In brittle environments, partial rest is a major cause of land damage and desertification.

pasture cropping - Growing crops by drilling grain crops into pasture. The pasture provides weed control, the crop increases biodiversity and grows extra food or forage, and pasture soil and plants benefit. Crops may be grazed down or harvested.

Pasture cropping was developed in an area of Australia where poor grazing management virtually eliminated cool-season grasses from native pastures. Drilling crops such as wheat and rye into pasture dominated by warm-season native grasses extends the growing season while increasing pasture health.

positive exception - Also called counterexample or positive deviation. An example that demonstrates exceptional performance. Once you find positive exceptions, you can determine what makes them different and do more of it.

This powerful approach has proved successful across a range of disciplines. A highly successful program for improving child nutrition in Vietnam looked for families that had the same access to resources as others in their village, yet provided their children with better nutrition. These families then became models and teachers for other villagers.

Richard Bandler developed NLP's famed fast phobia cures by studying people who had successfully gotten over phobias. Land managers who note which areas of their land display exceptionally good health and biodiversity can determine which factors to increase on the rest of their land.

Right now I am writing by my campfire in Zimbabwe where the government is claiming the economic meltdown is due to drought -- and many people believe that. Corn stands are pathetic and nowhere in the surrounding area was the grass higher than about half and inch. I wandered away from the crowd and soon found a place where the grass was a foot high and lush. This of course was a positive deviation. Every single place without exception where the grass was half an inch high and wilting, the surrounding soil was 99% bare and the grass plants were exposed to a few goats constantly overgrazing them. The corn likewise was planted on soil over 99% bare. By contrast, the place with the lush grass was under a small fallen thorn tree where the goats could not get their faces in to graze and the litter had caught between the grass plants. Clearly, although the rains are undoubtedly poor, this is really not a drought and is entirely man made, as is the economic meltdown.

-- Allan Savory, January 2003

positive feedback - Feedback that reinforces a process in motion. For instance, a fire burning hotter ignites more fuel, which makes the fire hotter, which ignites more fuel, and so on. As population increases, more babies get born, further increasing the population. As a cold spreads to more people, more people pass on the infection, so still more become sick.

Positive feedback is a very powerful force. We most often notice its effects when they are negative: pest and disease outbreaks, population and economic booms (followed by crashes), etc. Desertifying land grows ever less food for grazers, fewer grazers provide less animal impact, less impact means more overrest, and overrest hastens desertification.

But when we work with positive feedback, its self-reinforcing process can produce astounding results. A good idea spreads from dozens to millions of people. Healing desert grows more forage, which feeds more grazers that produce more animal impact, which plants more seeds that grow into plants that feed still more grazers.